This edited collection represents one of the most multifaceted studies to date on the contribution that women have made to science through authorship and translation, education and counselling, experimentation and illustration. Divided into three sections which focus in turn on how women have (re)presented science professionally, cast themselves as scientifically ‘curious’ individuals, or been portrayed in science fiction, this collection addresses from many different angles the role of women in the construction and transmission of scientific knowledge. From the scientific translators Marie-Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville, Clémence Royer and Marie Bonaparte to the medical reformers Elizabeth Blackwell and Eliza Farnham, from the extra-European traveller and naturalist Sybilla Merian to more domestically oriented women offering contraception advice in Nazi Germany, and from the emancipatory potential of science in Romantic literature to the female cyborgs of Japanese manga and anime in the 1980s and 1990s, this volume demonstrates that women have been an active presence in scientific culture and literature in Europe, America and well beyond for at least four centuries.

In the opening chapter on the works of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, both of whom were scientific women writing during the Scientific Revolution, Sandrine Parageau discusses how women were obliged to acquire and present their scientific knowledge in eclectic and rather unsystematic ways, determined by the scientific sociability they practised. Translation, rather than authorship, enabled Marie-Geneviève Thiroux d'Arconville to demonstrate her abilities as a ‘learned lady’ of science, as Margaret Carlyle shows in her analysis of the French edition which d'Arconville completed, together with Pierre-Joseph Macquer, of Peter Shaw's Chemical Lectures (1755). D'Arconville's annotations to the Leçons de Chymie (1759) enabled her to make critical and interpretative interventions by which her own translatorial voice could clearly be heard. Kay Etheridge's chapter on Maria Sybilla Merian makes a rich contribution to this section on women's self-expression by offering a detailed analysis of Merian's Metamorphosis (1705), a work that Etheridge observes would repay further scrutiny, since its illustrations give us valuable insights into Merian's observations of insect behaviour and ecology, while also informing her public in new and more illuminating ways and thus defying the narrower pictorial conventions of the period. Eliza W. Farnham's two-volume Woman and Her Era (1864) offered challenges of quite a different nature, Claire Sorin shows, since it recast the relationship between the sexes as one in which the regenerative function of women made them intrinsically superior to men. Female superiority was less in evidence in Weimar Germany, as Melissa Kravetz demonstrates in her investigation of the role played by female doctors and marriage counsellors in discussions surrounding which social, ethnic and economic groups qualified for marriage and child-bearing.

The second section, which mainly focuses on women's involvement in education, opens with Clara Cullen's discussion of female participation in the scientific courses run by the Museum of Irish Industry. While Cullen shows that a significant number of women participated in these courses of lectures and even won prizes in examinations, Véronique Molinari reveals how women's attempts to embark on medical studies in London were constantly fraught with difficulty, despite a strong desire on the part of women patients to be attended by members of their own sex. Elizabeth Blackwell encountered similar difficulties as she struggled to improve the medical education of women, as Hélène Quanquin shows, although she was careful to disassociate herself from radical feminism and women's rights activism. In a piece arguably better located in the first section, Lindsay Blake Wilson explores how the private lives of female scientists – notably Marie Curie – have been held up to harsher scrutiny than those of their male counterparts, thus tarnishing the reputations of women whose legacies need urgent re-evaluation. Amy Bix's chapter returns us to issues concerning women, science and education, taking the example of women's treatment at Georgia Tech as a salutary reminder that American engineering remained a male-dominated field until well after the Second World War.

In a change of tack, the final section opens with a discussion by Caroline Bertonèche of the role played by female emancipation in Romantic literature, a theme neatly picked up in the following chapter by David Leishman, who offers a fascinating discussion of how sterility, fertility and fecundity are cast in the works of the contemporary Scottish author Alasdair Gray. Donna Spalding Andréolle shifts the focus back to American feminist science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s to explore how similar issues of reproduction are addressed in works spawning alien women, mutant human females and men who suckle babies. The final contribution by Yukihide Endo brings the collection up to the end of the twentieth century with its discussion of how the figure of the cyborg has allowed a new alternative perspective on female gender identity to develop.

One of the great strengths of this collection is that it does not seek to cast all the women it covers as ‘trailblazers’ and ‘pioneers’ who launched a radical, reactionary, attack upon the bastions of ‘male’ science. Rather, it offers a careful analysis of how women negotiated and navigated their way around a series of obstacles to achieve public recognition or access to education. While Spalding Andréolle and Molinari could have explored more thoroughly how women and the history of science interconnect (a nod to Patricia Fara's work would surely not have gone amiss) and an index would have facilitated orientation within the volume, this vibrantly diverse collection will be of interest not only to historians of women's studies and of science, but also to scholars of translation studies, literature and film.